>This is the country that starved millions of its own citizens (the Great Leap Forward), annexed Tibet (and now pretends Tibet never existed) and killed thousands of its own citizens in peaceful pro-democracy protests (Tiannemen Square), the last only ~30 years ago.
Well, glass houses and stones and all that. There's a country that eliminated millions of its native citizens and restricted the little left to reservations, abducted and kept in slavery millions of black citizens for nearly four centuries, stole several huge areas from its southern neighbor, has the largest prison population in the world (25% of the world's prisoners for merely 4% the people in the world), had segregation for blacks until the late 60s, dropped two nuclear bombs (on civilians), has gone at war and/or occupied several countries all around the world that have no borders with it and had done nothing to it, has toppled foreign governments, has widespread surveillance that covers the whole world, meddles with worldwide politics, secret no-due-process prisons, regularly murders people in sovereign countries, they still have the death penalty, while the rest of the western world has abandoned, and their cops routinely kill thousands of people every year (especially black). Heck, they also bombed/invaded 4 different countries just in the last 20 years.
And they're pretending to have the moral high ground, and even point fingers to other countries! And if you point those things out, they go "but whataboutism", to restrict the conversation to some other party, which they present as uniquely bad.
Exactly correct. The history of the United States is marred with some horrible events. But that does not change the fact that there is a large faction within the Chinese government that views the US as an enemy and second rate power that must be humbled. The US should recognize this and act accordingly.
I don't dispute that, but I'm not personally concerned about them. We have our own hawks and would-be world-beaters.
I'm also not concerned about China econimically annexing Africa. It's between them, and you can't say the West has been terrific friends to the nations and peoples of that continent, can you?
And I think the renaissance of the Silk Road would be amazing. A massive river of wealth and culture spanning the whole of Eurasia, vibrant and alive again after ages fallow. Merv was considered the most beautiful city in the world for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv
My issue is with things like the sabre-rattling in the South China Sea, and the attempt to establish a stable society through mass mind-control and thought-policing. To my mind the legitimacy of the Communist government comes solely from the performance of the CCP in maintaining order. I think working toward economic well-being is a fine way to maintain order; but trying to cover up the "June Fourth Incident" is incredibly, wildly foolish.
YC just announced that they are going into China, and all I could think of was, what will you say when they ask you to call it the "June Fourth Incident" instead of "Tienanmen Square Massacre"? You're not naive, you must see that moment in the future, or have some idea to dodge it somehow? Will you kowtow?
To sum up, I like China and Chinese people; I don't like the CCP but only because of personal beliefs and preference; I don't think I'm capable of judging something so huge, that tries to run such a large and old nation. Nevertheless, some of their policies seem to me to be both odious and self-defeating. I'm alarmed that such an important source of world stability as the government of China might be acting foolishly. I mean, if we are going to elect a human cartoon character to our highest office I hope somebody is going to try to act like a grown-up, eh? The last thing the world needs is for the CCP to try to get into a dick-measuring contest with us in the sea, or demand to control the information everyone sees, or round people up into camps. Let's all settle down and make some money, because it's going to be expensive to cope with the weather from here on out, for everybody.
It is not a competition. The US did all those things (and more). It is bad, in many cases worse than China. But China is also bad and in many other cases did much worse than the US.
In my non-american opinion, tech companies doing business in China are bad for the world. The fact that the US thinks it has the moral high ground doesn’t enter into it (incidentally China also considers itself morally superior).
(Appologise for brevity and potential errors, I am typing this on a phone).
So I'm not sure what particular straw man or false equivalency argument you're trying to make but first let me point out that I'm not American, I'm Australian.
And you're right that there are grave issues (for these and many other countries) but that doesn't excuse the actions of the Chinse government. Nor does it make all such actions equivalent and the presence of such sins doesn't disqualify you from pointing out such abuses.
Let's not forget that in the US I can talk about slavery, segregation, the arguably illegal wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, taking land from Native Americans and a whole host of other issues because such information isn't censored and I'm not going to end up in a labour camp for bringing it up.
Until that's true in China, don't even try the moral equivalence argument.
>So I'm not sure what particular straw man or false equivalency argument you're trying to make but first let me point out that I'm not American, I'm Australian.
Doesn't change much. I'm contrasting the holier than thou western narrative vs China.
>And you're right that there are grave issues (for these and many other countries) but that doesn't excuse the actions of the Chinse government.
No, it just makes hypocrites of those that single it out.
>Nor does it make all such actions equivalent and the presence of such sins doesn't disqualify you from pointing out such abuses.
Sure. I posit that the actions I've described are actually worse.
>Let's not forget that in the US I can talk about slavery, segregation, the arguably illegal wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, taking land from Native Americans and a whole host of other issues because such information isn't censored and I'm not going to end up in a labour camp for bringing it up. Until that's true in China, don't even try the moral equivalence argument.
So, the idea is that it's OK to do bad things, as long as people in your country can openly talk about them?
Especially as this talk is just ignored (people talking and demonstrating about it didn't stop the Vietnam war continuing for 2 decades, or the abolition of slavery taking 4 centuries and a huge civil war).
Clearly no modern person has the moral high ground on anything when looking through the lens of history. I'm surprised the world hasn't fallen into total anarchy since no one can stand up and say "That's wrong!"
The difference is that we don't lionize the actions of our ancestors. We acknowledge that the wholesale destruction of first peoples was a horrific act of violence, and the US does not cover up the ugly parts of its history. We talk about it openly.
>The difference is that we don't lionize the actions of our ancestors
Huh? It's notorious for doing just that. From the bizarro workship of the
founding fathers, to celebrating people like Custer, to the whole Confederacy thing in the South, and so on. All kinds of dark history, from the treatment of Chinese in 19th century, to the mass murders of immigrants and workers fighting for their rights (e.g. at Ludlow) are swept under the rug.
>We acknowledge that the wholesale destruction of first peoples was a horrific act of violence, and the US does not cover up the ugly parts of its history. We talk about it openly.
Only in the sense that people don't go to jail for talking about them. Otherwise, the official histories and accounts all sidestep the ugly parts of history, wash them out in official narratives, and so on, and it takes people like Howard Zinn to make them somewhat known.
Heck, people are still taught the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagashaki where "necessary" and used to "stop the war".
Some of the ugliest parts is happening now and "you" are not openly talking about it (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Africa, military bases all over Europe, Asia, Latin America, etc).
American government is killing thousands more people yearly then Chinese for a long, long time.
I think that with all the money and power that comes with being a superpower, some bad acts are inevitable. There's just too many tendrils on the beast to control all its machinations.
Still, all things considered, I truly believe that America is relatively good, fair, and just, given the circumstances. Just imagine what the world would be like if positions were reversed, and China or Russia were the unchecked world superpower. I suspect such a reality would make you yearn for the balance we have today.
> Just imagine what the world would be like if positions were reversed, and China or Russia were the unchecked world superpower. I suspect such a reality would make you yearn for the balance we have today.
As a Latino and living in Brazil, I'm hoping for this to happen (and is happening). Brazilian business with Chinese and Russians are a lot more fair to our side than business done with US. And they don't use military force.
Now if I talk as a citizen of the world, I think the US is one of the greatest superpower of all history and brought insurmountable amount of human development (in pair with Egypt). But as a Brazilian, some if not all of our worldly known issues are because or related to the way our economic elite do business with the US.
Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are all debated vociferously in this country, and though they have taken a back seat to the shitshow of our current presidency, they are absolutely contentious issues in academia, foreign policy circles, and in public. To say that the American people somehow don’t have these discussions is absurd. Furthermore, your implication seems to be that because the US government does things that are morally wrong, Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
> Furthermore, your implication seems to be that because the US government does things that are morally wrong, Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
No, what I'm saying is that Americans can't point fingers to China and Chinese while America state has a much more tighter grip on the world than China state. If you wanna fix human right problems in the world, you can have a lot more impact doing it at home than abroad.
>* Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are all debated vociferously in this country,*
"Vociferously" as in "some pundits talk about them but nobody really cares about those things, no politician resigned because of them, no mass demonstrations anywhere, and even when people talk it's the usual hypocrisy show (when it's not just about the costs and the toll on our own soldiers), meanwhile things get on as usual..."
>Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
Actually sounds very valid.
Makes sense, to get one's house in order before they can talk about others. In fact that's where they should have more impact (and more moral responsibility to get right).
But it's also the case that such "criticizing other governments" is used by their own government as justification for all kinds of interventions.
It's this "criticizing of other governments" that was used to justify the wars and interventions that made Iraq and Libya from stable if autarchic regimes into today's hell on earth, for example.
1) autarchic and autocratic mean two different things. The word you’re looking for is autocratic.
2) The US is a democracy, is pretty diverse in terms of opinions, and the US government does things that the people don’t like (just like in China). I don’t hold the individuals of China accountable for egregious and unacceptable human rights violations of the Chinese government. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of US society to say that the people of the US are inseparable from their government’s decisions.
3) You still have yet to seriously engage the notion that the Chinese government is perpetrating wholesale oppression of a class of people simply for having a different identity. Whatever the US does doesn’t change how morally reprehensible that is. What-about-ism doesn’t change the moral calculus here one iota.
> You still have yet to seriously engage the notion that the Chinese government is perpetrating wholesale oppression of a class of people simply for having a different identity. Whatever the US does doesn’t change how morally reprehensible that is.
The US systematically does the same to its black portion of the population since always, sometimes in extreme ways, other times in soft ways.
Agreed.
And as usual, I look for the greyed-out comments (like yours) to find a balance and objectivity, missing in the bulk of the (mostly hypocritical) thread.
Can you imagine what people would say if European currency had Adolf Hitler's face on it? Can you imagine if the Nazis were still in power in Germany?
Chinese currency has Mao's face on it, and he was a much bigger mass murderer that Hitler. The party he ran is still in power, and still actively violating basic human rights of its citizens.
If I made an equivalent comment similar to coldtea's, one detailing a list of China's sins, on Chinese social media... place your bets on whether or not this post would be removed by the government censors. I bet it would, personally. Probably rather quickly.
Some of the "counterpoints" also were strange considering we are talking about China. For instance, China executes more people than anyone else in the world, and even when adjusted at a per capita level China's rate is quite a bit higher than the United States. (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/12/china-st...) And China's internet surveillance is far worse than the United States, probably one of the worst in the world as far as this goes (eg "Great Firewall", large divisions of government devoted to censoring social media, etc.) -- it is more internal focused at this time, granted, but still.
China certainly is meddling in other nations' foreign politics too (just look at the recent politics in Asian countries with the Belt and Road Initiative, with some commentators such as this -- https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/08/28/commentary/w... -- worried about such being a "debt trap" for political purposes). And the worrying militarization of the American police force still compares nothing to what China is doing in Xinjiang (https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...).
There certainly are Americans that gloss over our sins and over-promote "American exceptionalism". I don't see that in most of the Hacker News crowd -- I think most Americans on here are plenty aware of our faults and transgressions, and are often rather vocally against our own nation's suppression of dissent and free speech. But China's on another level, a much tighter authoritarian state with much more active spying and suppression. I think it's hard to argue against this.
But the question at hand is not "Which government is more evil?" (Even though I think the answer is clear even though U.S. government is horrific.) The question was "Is Google reentering China likely to do net good for the world?" China evil is directly relevant to that, U.S. evil only peripherally.
Beyond that, which-tribe-is-better arguments powerfully attract flamewars. They're a fantastic way to deflect the original question. It's a classic pattern, and so we have a word for it, whataboutism.
>But the question at hand is not "Which government is more evil?" (Even though I think the answer is clear even though U.S. government is horrific.) The question was "Is Google reentering China likely to do net good for the world?" China evil is directly relevant to that, U.S. evil only peripherally.
Well, when put in front of a question, it's good to question the question itself.
People, media, governments, etc frame questions all day in a constrained way, either because it serves some interests, or because they can't see the bigger picture, or because they're used to thinking with blinders on.
I'd say that a question like "Is Google reentering China likely to do net good for the world?" much be put into question itself.
Why would it be good or bad? What is China? How is Google's own country better? What Google already does elsewhere? Is that good? Is China the same as "Chinese government"? and so on...
So the fact that the US did not consider Native Americans citizens made their killing somewhat justifiable?
It seems to me you’re making a strong case for GPs point about how perceived US moral superiority influences one's arguments. It doesn't matter whether the US (the oppressor!) considered them citizens. It matters that they were people.
Disturbing how in the light of NSA revelations many people here were more concerned that they were spying on americans rather than the fact that they were spying on people.
Well, glass houses and stones and all that. There's a country that eliminated millions of its native citizens and restricted the little left to reservations, abducted and kept in slavery millions of black citizens for nearly four centuries, stole several huge areas from its southern neighbor, has the largest prison population in the world (25% of the world's prisoners for merely 4% the people in the world), had segregation for blacks until the late 60s, dropped two nuclear bombs (on civilians), has gone at war and/or occupied several countries all around the world that have no borders with it and had done nothing to it, has toppled foreign governments, has widespread surveillance that covers the whole world, meddles with worldwide politics, secret no-due-process prisons, regularly murders people in sovereign countries, they still have the death penalty, while the rest of the western world has abandoned, and their cops routinely kill thousands of people every year (especially black). Heck, they also bombed/invaded 4 different countries just in the last 20 years.
And they're pretending to have the moral high ground, and even point fingers to other countries! And if you point those things out, they go "but whataboutism", to restrict the conversation to some other party, which they present as uniquely bad.